‘I do not, indeed.’ Dinah’s manner grew colder and colder. ‘I never heard of Becky Sharpe before.’
‘Well, if you had,’ said Linda, in high good humour, and storing up all the little scene against future dramatisation—‘if you had heard of Becky Sharpe, and had thought me like her, where would be the wonder? I was brought up just as Becky was, to live by my wits. My mamma—I connect her hazily with sofa cushions, much white embroidery, an Italian greyhound, doctors, and the smell of ether—my mamma died when I was four years old. She lies in Brussels cemetery,’ ran on Linda, drawing a hasty outline of a tombstone on the sand, ‘with Lady Constantia Smythe, and more than one side allusion to the peerage graven above her head. At the time she died we had not very definite daily bread. Still, my grandfather was an earl, and poor papa found one of his few consolations in making much of our nobility.’
Frankness, it would seem, was Linda Thorne’s strong point, but Dinah was unmoved by it. The earldom dazzled Gaston Arbuthnot’s lowly-born wife no more than Linda’s personal confidences propitiated her. Dinah had a child’s instinct for friends and for enemies. She liked, she disliked, unerringly, and was too transparently honest to mask her feelings.
Stooping down, she picked up another shell from the sea’s smooth edge. She sought once more to widen the space between herself and her companion. Linda Thorne’s quick brain observed the movement, divined the intention.
‘Excellent, stupid, well-meaning, ill-acting young woman. And I have not a reprehensible sentiment at all towards her!’ Thoughts like this shot through Linda’s mind—Linda who really had it not in her to know sterner passion than a drawing-room malignity. ‘With her youth, her goodness, her complexion, her upper lip, to be jealous of poor, plain, cynical, elderly me! She needs a pretty sharp lesson. Children who cry for the moon deserve to get something worth crying for.’ Then, sweetly, ‘You seem interested in shells, dear Mrs. Arbuthnot,’ she observed aloud. ‘You study conchology as a science, perhaps, under the Platonic auspices of that severe-looking cousin of yours, Geoffrey Arbuthnot of John’s.’
‘I study nothing, unfortunately for myself. I am quite ignorant,’ said Dinah, lifting her face and meeting her tormentor’s eyes full. ‘I am picking up a shell or two,’ she added, ‘to keep as a remembrance of my day in Langrune.’
‘I should say you would remember Langrune without any tangible memento,’ remarked Linda. ‘Rather ungrateful, you know, if you did not.’
‘How, ungrateful?’
‘Well, because the picnic was given unconditionally in honour of you——’